Monday, November 19, 2007

Swing!! ....And a Miss

What I'm going to share in this blog posts is some data on my spec.

I'm using the Raid Boss Void Reaver. With the excitement over Zul'Aman and 2.3, Void Reaver is the only boss I've done in both specs for a comparison. I've got one parse (3 attempts) in my old spec and 1 parse (6 attempts) in my new spec.

If I look over the entire parse, the first night of attempts had many more trash mob fights than the 2nd night. The 2nd night we cleared trash much faster. To try to get as accurate a picture as possible, I'm going to have to strip out all the Trash Mobs and just look at VR.

With my old spec I had 3/3 Precision and 0/5 of the old Weapon Expertise.

My new spec has 2/3 Precision and 5/5 of the new Combat Expertise.

As I looked over the data, I found that my "miss" rate increased by 1%. In my old spec, I missed about 5% of the time. In my new spec, I missed 6%. The difference between 2/3 Precision and 3/3 Precision is 1%. This would be the expected result.

What is disturbing is that I was Parried/Dodged about 2% more in my new spec. This spec, as you will remember, includes Combat Expertise. Expertise is supposed to reduce your chance to be parried or dodged. What I gather from this is that the amount of Expertise granted from the talent is not enough to make a difference. I am not sure how to account for the increase amount of Parry and Dodge.

The rate of Resists from the two fights were unchanged. Precision is supposed to have a 3% spell hit component to it, but I had a 12% resist rate in the old spec and a 12% resist rate in the new spec. Since the old spec was in 2.2, before they added spell hit to the talent, I would have been facing a base 17% resist rate. This would have changed to 15% in 2.3 with 2 points in Precision. I conclude that the 2% change in resist chance was too small to be noticed on these fights.

Since Void Reaver is a fight where he goes from tank to tank, I thought it would be a good opportunity to see how I compare to other tanks in Damage taken. One of the issues sited by my Druid Healer "friend" was that Paladins take more damage.

I looked only at "normal" hits and ignored any Crushes. Since you don't know when VR will change targets, you are not spending rage or mana on your Crush Immunity. I also ignored the last attempt of the 2nd night when we hit the enrage timer causing a rather large hit on Lanorah that would have skewed her average.

There was a large disparity in average damage taken by tanks. Raydz had a delta of nearly 1400 (low average at 3061, high average at 4324). Lanorah's delta was even higher at 1600 (her lowest average was 2972, highest average was 4563). These were all normal hits. No crushes, no crits. Sometimes the sample size was too small. Lanorah largest average was 4563 but that was a fight where Void Reaver only hit him one time.

So if you look at all 6 attempts, it breaks out this way (ignoring the 1 hit Lan took when he was enraged).

Honorshammer took 122 hits for a total of 402,875 damage.

Lanorah took 112 hits for a total of 362,768 damage

Raydz took 53 hits for a total of 186,941 damage.

Lanorah's average was 3238, mine was 3302, and Raydz was 3527. I took about 2% more damage than Lan, but about 7% less damage than Raydz.

Did I take the most hits because I held aggro the longest or because Lan has almost a 4% advantage over me in his Dodge chance?

Armory is down right now, so I can't see how much we differ in gear. I know I've got a better chest and shield than Raydz and Lanorah has more T4 than me. My belief is that the difference is much more a factor of gear than class. That's what I'm going to believe until I see evidence to the contrary.

To a certain point, it's a moot point. The Raid Leaders, and Guild Leaders have seen me in action and trust me to tank. I think I can back off on the hard sell.

I'm definitely keeping the Combat Expertise talent, just for the Stamina buff. I'm tempted to go back to 3/3 Precision and drop 1 point from Imp Crusader.